The Cry of the Sloth

by Sam Savage

Central here is the farcical, dark humour of a self-deluded, struggling novelist running a small literary magazine, whilst his personal life disintegrates around him under mounting debt. This is an epistolary novel told in a series of random letters (penned by the novelist) to various correspondents. The tone is self-deprecating and satirical, and seems likely to achieve a small cult following amongst the disaffected.

Extract

Dear Mrs Lipsocket,

You have been sending me your poems off and on for four years. For the first three of those I labored to comment, comforting you with platitudes, while covertly advising you tactfully to chuck it. Yet you have continued against all odds. You have written me pitiful letters. You have wrung my heart with descriptions of your literary sufferings, with which I have sympathized; your outsized ambitions, which are so like my own; your ovarian problems, the cruelty of your library committee ...